First of all I would like to apologize, this was downloaded off of a YouTube video. Also I would like to say that this doesn't reflect my personal music preference, only my culture.

I chose to show the culture of D&D. To start with simple explanation, D&D was developed as a prelude to Videogames, and was a board game where anything could happen and you didn’t have to respond the way you normally do. It was played for fun, and also to give you a life where you felt strong. Now that videogames are out, it has less of a following. Instead of gaining a feeling of power by hanging out with people and rolling dice, it is gained by shooting Nazis in modern videogames. However, D&D still has the advantage of giving the player more options, and never really ending until you die.

D&D has a rather twisted culture, on that even the people involved in it don’t exactly revere.  The clip shows the women dodging the question for as long as possible before opening up. However, the clip also shows a few culture that aren’t necessarily involved in D&D. Sure it’s possible for everyone to dress up as their player, it just doesn’t need to or usually happen.

Before seeing the video I had no idea who the person was. That’s part of what D&D is about; you have no clue who’s involved, which’s shown by the beginning of the clip when the singer denies that she’s involved. I learned about the song from someone else that also liked D&D. He thought it was cool and showed it to me. The genre of the song completely shows what D&D is all about. After all, D&D loves parodies. The whole entire thing is made as a merge of all of the fantasy books in existence. It’s also directly involved to the game from the characters in the song, the terminology involved and also the monsters mentioned. I am not involved in the specific subsection of D&D that this song is interested in, since I don’t role-play as seriously, I just go and kill things and hang out. These people have stuff that they dress up in, which is way more serious then most of the people I know of.

I’ve been looking up to Kanye West for the longest. He’s so inspirational, and sparks so much controversy. This song illustrates who Kanye West is. He does what he wants, says what he wants, and doesn’t care about the consequences. His drive to say what he wants and get his point across “moves” me, along with his catchy lyrics and deeper meanings to his songs.

Kanye is known to be “the asshole” because he speaks his mind. Some of the things he says people don’t agree with. That’s just how it is. There is no one out there who will have every single person relate to what they’re saying, or even support what they’re saying, and that’s perfectly fine for Kanye in his situation. He has experienced pain and judgment from other people because of it, and apologized when he took it too far, but he never goes back on his word. That’s someone to look up to. Someone who can rap about sex and money, but also have records about diamonds in Sierra Leone, songs about Jesus, and songs that displays how great mothers are. He’s reached out to different genres, sometimes it could be about happiness, sometimes it could be about pain.

The song “Touch the sky” represents the outspoken culture I’m apart of. I’m part of the people who voice their opinion, and isn’t afraid to go against the crowd. I’ll challenge people’s ideas and I won’t just go with something everyone else is doing unless I find it right to me. It also represents the culture of people who have a hopeful future and have something to look forward to. In the song he describes his journey to where he is now, and is a person to look up to. 

Skyscraper- Demi Lovato

I loved Demi Lovato ever since I saw her on the movie “camp rock”(2008) and princess protection program (2009) and when I heard one of her first songs “LaLa land”. I liked her because she didn’t come off as a “fake person”, most people that are famous act like a robot, with know personality or is scared to let it show there afraid to be them selves. They act like they don’t have problems, or struggles in there life, but Demi Lovato is very different from them. She doesn’t try to hide her problems from the world, and act like everything is perfect, instead she speaks out about having depression since the age of 11, and that she had a bipolar disorder. She does not speak about it to be in the spotlight, she wants to let her fans that are going through these challenges know that they can make it just like her, and that they are worth it. She’s a remodel to me because she helps me get through the things that I go through as a person, and a teenager. The song skyscraper is about believing in your self, and know matter what your going through or what has happen to you, you can always rise and over come your struggles, like how a skyscraper rises over top of a city.

 The song represents my culture, which are sports. When you play sports there’s always going to problems you have to get through. If you playing basketball or football you might have to play defense on someone that’s faster than you or stronger than you and your going to have to believe in your self to “stick with your man”. If you miss a shot in basketball you can’t be discourage, nobody is perfect so your going to have to keep your head up high and try it over and over again.

 This song represents all different types of people and cultures. It doesn’t matter what you’re skin color is, what type of music you listen to, or even the religion you believe in, everyone goes through hard times in life. Because this song is so uplifting, and inspiring it came reach more than the “average listener”. The song just has one purpose and that purpose is to let everyone know that the matter.

An aspect of my culture is perseverance. I believe that perseverance is a major aspect of your culture because without it, life is dead. Perseverance is what makes you keep going each day as each battles encounter. I chose the song The Climb by Miley Cyrus. This song relates to my life a lot and others as well. When I was growing up, I never knew such thing like perseverance. I heard of it before but it doesn’t mean much until now. As teenagers growing up, like Miley Cyrus, never know the real meaning of perseverance. In The Climb, it is all about facing your battles. Keep you head up and lead your path, as it can lead you to somewhere special that you may never know. The objects in this song centers around imagery of a mountain, symbolizing the difficulties of life, and climbing, symbolizing the ongoing struggles of life. Although the lyrics are talking about the journey rather than focusing on the destination, many assume that it is about reaching a final goal. It depends on the mindset of the listener to judge whether the destination is in front of them or it is on the other side of the path. As a child, I have battled many battles during my childhood, especially the violence back them to now. That limits my childhood from spending time inside rather than outside due to the craziness of violence. As I was growing up, I began to develop the meaning of persevering. Each day conflicts come at you and you have to overcome it. In the music video of The Climb, it shows a mountain. That symbolizes the conflicts that you have to overcome by climbing the mountains. The mountains are the problems and you are the overcomer. The combination of both is what I call perseverance. “…Ain't about how fast I get there. Ain't about what's waiting on the other side. It's the climb…” That phrase is from the The Climb. This explains how you have to go step by step in life to get through the problem or problems. What moves me about them is the voice of the artist singing it. It is so demanding and convincing to start something new. In other words, if something is bringing you down, you should never quit. Never quit trying to quit is basically the whole purpose of this song.

I believe this song is a very important part of my culture. Without perseverance, I wouldn’t have made it to this day with all the battles coming at me. I persevere every day to get what I want in life. Challenges come and go, but it won’t go if you don’t persevere through it. Like the mountain, in the music video of The Climb, the mountain is still going to be there, if you don’t climb over it. Overcoming your challenges is the word to describe this culture, perseverance. This song has a lot of meanings and it speaks for itself a lot. But the main focus of this song is not letting yourself down when something encounters you. That would just make you a failure. Perseverance brings you up and guides you to do something better to get over the problem. It doesn’t matter how fast or how slow you overcome it, but as long it is overcome, you are leading your battles to where you want it to be.

Monisha Das                                                                                                      3-29-12

Music & Culture

“Keep Holding On”

The singer of this song is Avril Lavgine. I have been listening to her songs for the past few years. I don’t know much about her but I do know that her songs are really encouraging n heart throbbing. She has been singing for many years but has done a few movies. I cannot really relate to many of her songs that well, but when I first heard this song it really touched my heart and I just kept listening to it.

When I listen to this song, I forget about all the bad things that has happen in life and replace them with positive thoughts. I noticed that Lavgine sings as though she has been though the thing that happened in the songs. I like when a singer can connect to a song, this lets me know that I can connect to the song too.

What moves me about this song is the way the song flows and how she talks about holding on and never giving up. In my culture SquashSmarts, everyone has worked together to help each other and tell them to never give up. It does not matter who wins or losses but it matters that you have a good time and that you have fun. We have a great family bond that, kind of, matches with the some of the lyrics in the songs. The lyrics also show sportsmanship that we always show in practice and when we have games.

No matter what happens in my culture, we will never give up on each other and we will always be a great huge loving family.

Music isn’t really my thing so I don’t think this would be very long. But ill try my best to make this thing longer. For example this sentence that have nothing to do with music at.

Anyways music to me is a distracting so I don’t really like it. The only time I listing to music am when I sleep because for different types of music make me dream about different dreams. But anyways one of the music I listen to is the arrogant worm.

I listen to any music so I don’t really have a favorite or any music that have to do with my culture. I just listen to what the radio plays for what I find on YouTube. Any culture of music is fine with me along it isn’t cursing all the way. Some of the music I listen to is dub stab because it’s weird and sounds crazy. I believe it was made in troupe I think not really sure.

But overall I prefer music that is upbeat yet soothing. I dislike rock n roll for I think that is just banging on things and I consider it noise. Well Imp not really sure what culture of music I listen to because it don’t really matter and I don’t listen to music much anyways. I don’t really like music in the 1^st place so why am I still typing about it, well I don’t really know I guess its just to fill up a page of words. Some songs that I like are dub step; I don’t really like any so the list is very short. In fact erase dub step too since its not like I love it.